Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Re: A Solar Powered Industrial Farm in CA

I saw this in todays San Jose Mercury News, and a blogger wrote about it here. Namely, a farmer in California's Central Valley has put a 1+ megawatt solar array on a 150,000 square foot "shed". That's a mighty big shed, if you ask me.

Anyway, the Central Valley gets a lot of sun. That makes it a good place to use solar power.

To answer a couple confusions in the discussion in the blog posting ... when you talk about the size of a solar array, it's given in peak power output. In practice that solar array will produce less energy, but in peak/optimum times it would produce 1 megawatt or more. Further, that's at an instant, as there's a difference between a megawatt, and a megawatt-hour. A megawatt-hour is a megawatt sustained over a 1 hour period, while a megawatt is simply the power running at a specific instant.

Obviously there are a lot of rooftops that are otherwise unused, and could be filled with solar panels. I ask you to visit, switch to the satellite view, and browse around any urban/industrial area. You'll see the majority of the picture area is taken up with rooftops and parking lots. Both of them could serve a dual purpose with solar panels.


Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Books about the Oil Peak


Mental and Physical and Spiritual preparation for peak oil

Here's an interesting perspective on preparing for the Oil Peak phenomenon. That is, to think about the stages of acceptance of death as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.


The Oil Drum: Sadly, It Truly Isn't Just a River in Egypt


When you teach people about how to learn about/research complex problems, they are usually instructed to follow some version of this process:

  1. identify the process through which social problems are constructed,
  2. identify existence of the social problem,
  3. identify core causes of the social problem,
  4. identify structural solutions to the social problem, and
  5. identify individual actions that contribute to structural solutions.


Americans are at various stages of awareness and acceptance of our addiction to oil. Viewed from afar, the range of public attitudes seems remarkably similar to the five stages of grief famously described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance. (the Kubler-Ross ideas were initially recorded here by Bob Burnett)

This reminds me of the Gasoholics Anonymous pledge I was inspired to write a few years ago.


Monday, June 20, 2005

Solaicx; making solar electricity cost effective

I passed by this company on my way home this evening and saw the tag-line on the sign outside their building: We're making solar electricity cost effective and went, "hmmm... why haven't I seen that sign before?".

I've passed by that building a hundred times, and not seen it. Maybe they're new to the building or something.


That's the company web site. They don't say a lot, probably they're still in R&D and don't want to disclose very much. Anyway, they do say their focus is to optimize "single crystal" photovoltaics, pointing to the fact that most of the cost is from the traditional way the wafers are made. They're apparently developing a new process of producing wafers that's "optimized" for photovoltaic production.

This being silicon valley, it makes sense that we'd have some people here who could develop an optimized way to producing wafers.


Sunday, June 19, 2005

A political side to oil economics, in Ecuador

In Ecuador Gets Chávez'd (May 11, 2005, The Nation) Greg Palast examines an interesting series of events related to Ecuador, Oil, and the political finaglings ...

Basically, Ecuador has a lot of debt, and the terms of the debt require that a huge portion of oil income to Ecuador go directly to paying the debt. This is instead of doing something useful like improving the social infrastructure in Ecuador. Instead of improving hospitals and the like, the terms call for sending money to the fat cats.

And just who are these fat cats? They are the people who'd previously pillaged Ecuador's economic wealth, and then fled to South Florida. They own the bonds, and hence own the mortgage on the country they had previously pillaged.

What's happened is that a new fellow is holding the office of President. The previous President fled the country in the face of massive protests, that followed tightened austerity measures required by the bond repayment requirements. The previous President had promised to overturn those bond repayment requirements in favor of improving the peoples welfare, but reneged on those promises just after taking office and flying to Washington for indoctrination by the power elite there.

The new President is the former Vice President. He was constitutionally put into place after the previous President fled. Yet, the U.S. government is making noises questioning his legitimacy - in a move which Palast likens to the treatment of Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela.

The situation regarding oil is largely technological - that is, are there alternative energy technologies that can replace the role oil plays? But the technological solution is being hindered by political gamesmanship like is demonstrated in this case. There is a lot of money and investment tied up in the existing oil-based game, enough money so that the ones who own the related investments have enough power to buy the U.S. Presidency for President Bush (a.k.a. President Enron, Vice President Halliburton, Secretary of State Chevron, etc).


Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Short-sighted EXXON

The argument has been made before that "economics" must drive the decision to use one energy technology over another. This argument is being made again by Exxon.

Solar, wind energy fail Exxon profit test

Economics, in this case, being the end cost of producing energy. This gets measured in two ways. One is the cost in building the infrastructure or production plant, and the other is the cost you charge customers for the electricity.

Exxon estimates solar and wind energy demand will grow at a 10 percent rate annually over the next 25 years, but only on the back of government subsidies and tax breaks to spur investment in cleaner, environment-friendly energy sources.

Strip out the handouts, and investing in wind and solar energy would be nonstarters, the manager of Exxon's energy demand and supply forecasting division told Reuters last week.

"It's an uneconomic niche and our business is not built around the expectation of a bunch of subsidies to make a profit," said Scott Nauman, manager of the economics and energy division at Exxon. "We want a business that is robust on its own merits."

Wind energy, for example, is constrained by several factors — wind farms can be located only in windy areas and backup coal or gas facilities must be used when it isn't windy enough, he said.

Well, hmm....

There's a problem here in their reasoning. See, when "infinite growth" meets an "finite resource" what results is that the finite resource ultimately is depleted.

We see that beginning to happen with Oil now. The oil peak scenario is upon us, and sooner or later it will happen.

What Exxon is saying is they're ignoring the finiteness of the resource, and continuing to rely on that finite resource for their business. They could wake up and smell the reality and say, "gosh, we need to move to other energy resources if we want to stay in business", but they're just showing how short-sighted they are.


Sweden shuts nuclear plant in a shift to wind power

In 1980 Sweden voted, in a referendum, to shut down their nuclear power plants in favor of renewable resources. They are apparently doing this in an orderly fashion, arranging for replacement power before shutting down the nuclear power. Hence, it's taken 25 years to get the ball rolling.

Sweden shuts nuclear plant in shift to wind Voters backed move in 1980, before global warming became factor

The Barseback-2 nuclear reactor was Sweden's oldest, accounting for three percent of the country's total electricity output. Nuclear power provides 40 percent of Sweden's electricity.

The closure is part of nuclear phase-out program backed in a referendum in 1980. The first reactor at Barseback closed in 1999.

... Longer term, Sweden is planning a big increase in renewable energy. State-owned Vattenfall, which operates Barseback, said it would invest $1 billion in building northern Europe’s biggest wind farm.

Vattenfall said it hoped to begin construction of 100-150 wind power turbines in 2009, generating more than 2 terawatt hours of electricity per year from 2010.

Barseback produced around 4 terawatt hours out of Sweden’s total 148 in 2004.

It also plans to invest $218 million to build an offshore wind power park in the Oresund sound near the bridge between southern Sweden and Denmark.

However, some in the industry don't feel wind will be as reliable as nuclear power since power can fluctuate depending on the weather.


A picture of oil depletion

To a lay-person like me, I kinda understand how the oil depletion occurs, but a picture really helps to grok the story.

A picture of depletion

The picture itself is a little confusing, until you read the explanation.

It's an underground scan of an oil field, the Abqaiq oilfield in Saudi Arabia. The blue area is water that's been pumped in to help extract more oil, the red area is natural gas, and the little slice of green is the remaining oil. Disturbing, isn't it, how when that field was untapped the whole thing woulda been green, but all that's left is that little bit.